Written in just four days, Song of Trees won the contest it was written for and began the epic of the Logan family, which would carry the unsuspecting Taylor through five more novels. Ironically, it was not only her father's stories, but also the deadline for a writing contest that inspired Taylor's first novel. In the early 1970s, though, Taylor left gainful employment for a series of temporary editing and proofreading jobs that allowed her time to write. She stayed on at Colorado after graduation and worked there, in the study skills center, for two years. While there, Taylor cofounded a black students' group and a black studies department. and Ethiopia, and received a master's degree in English from the University of Colorado in 1969. I wanted to show the endurance of the Black world, with strong fathers and concerned mothers I wanted to show happy, loved children…I wanted to show a Black family united in love and pride, of which the reader would like to be a part.'īefore beginning her career, though, she graduated from the University of Toledo in 1965, served in the Peace Corps as an English and History teacher in the U.S. 'By the time I entered high school, I had a driving compulsion to paint a truer picture of Black people. It was the desire to correct this misshapen image that drove Taylor to write. 'From as far back as I can remember, my father taught me a different history from the one I learned in school.' Though the Civil War was long over, Taylor's life was filled with residual prejudice from segregated schools to Anglo-biased textbooks, Mildred Taylor and the other African Americans of her time were inundated with negative images of her race. Her father, 'a master storyteller,' profoundly influenced his daughter 'Throughout my childhood he impressed upon my sister and me that we were somebody, that we were important and could do or be anything we set our minds to be.' She lived with her parents, Wilbert Lee and Deletha Marie, sister, Wilma, and - at times - a number of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Though she was born in Mississippi, Mildred Delois Taylor spent her childhood - all the way up through college - in Toledo, Ohio. 'I do not know how old I was when the daydreams became more than that, and I decided to write them down, but by the time I entered high school, I was confident that I would one day be a writer.' Ohio Reading Road Trip | Mildred Taylor Biography

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